The historical image heritage of most societies, industries and individuals is on film (e.g., motion picture film defining a displayable visual experience (e.g., a movie)). A problem in retrieving content on this film is that surface defects on the film adversely impact (e.g., mar) the images held inside the film. Most of these defects, including scratches and dust, adversely impact the image by deflecting light rays by refraction.
It is a goal of a defect correction system to hide or remove defects found on the surface of the film from the scanned image without altering the image content contained within the film. Most of the systems in use today utilize software tools that analyze digital image content that has been generated by a digital film scanner that scans analog film images. The software tools often are inaccurate in identifying defects and usually require a decision by an operator to determine what pixels to erase and replace with similar content. These systems tend to be less than perfectly accurate as there is a tradeoff between eliminating suspected defects and eliminating image content that may look like a defect to a software program of a defect correction system.
Most software systems that operate upon digital images (i.e., a defect correction system) tend to repair only a small percentage of the total number of surface defects due to the high risk of false positive defect identification. Additionally, systems that require the scanning of film and subsequent operations by human operator using software systems tend to be expensive and thus have high cost structures. The high costs often make the current systems non-competitive when servicing a large film archive that needs preservation through digitization of the film in a library.
Therefore, a film imaging solution that both reduces the cost of preserving large film archives by generating digital images of the analog images in film and that implements defect correction for improving the quality of these digital images in a manner that overcomes shortcomings of known defect correction solutions would be advantageous, desirable and useful.